Did you know that there an estimated 500 million blogs on the web? Of those, roughly 3.9% of them are Canadian. Which means there are about 19,500,000 Canadian blogs out there.
Think about that. That’s one blog for every single person in Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan combined! So, how do you make your blog stand above all of that noise?
The good news is that most people are blogging the wrong way. They’re treating it like a hobby, with nearly half of spending 5 hours or less working on their blog. This is why almost 70% of bloggers make zero money.
But, you're better than that. Today we’re going to show you how to take blogging seriously, while avoiding many of the mistakes that separate the successful bloggers from all the rest.
1. Invest in Quality Hosting
Just because there are dozens of free or cheap hosting options out there doesn't mean they're a good idea. Bad hosting is one of the top blog-killers out there today.
You get what you pay for. Choosing cheap hosting usually means you will struggle with downtime and slow page load speeds. The latter is a huge deal, as most people will give up on your blog if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
There are fantastic Canadian Wordpress hosting solutions out there for very reasonable pricing. Don't cut corners or it will cut your traffic.
2. Be Mobile
Did you build your blog with desktop users in mind? Most bloggers do, even though mobile web traffic started to exceed desktop traffic some time ago, and Google has officially announced they are indexing mobile sites first.
This means both Google bots and human beings are more interested in your mobile site than your desktop.
Make sure your blog is optimized for mobile users.
3. Answer the Important Questions
One of the biggest mistakes that most bloggers make is assuming they know what their audience wants to read, instead of doing the research to back these assumptions up.
Find the most frequently asked questions and longtail keywords by using a tool like SEMrush or ahrefs.
Let's say you're a divorce lawyer and you think your audience wants to know a lot about spousal support. Either of those tools may show you that your readers are actually more interested in child custody rights.
4. Pay Extra Attention to Your Pictures
You probably don’t have the budget for an Adobe Stock or Shutterstock account. But that's ok, you can still get strikingly high-quality images from free sites.
It also costs you nothing to simply make more thoughtful image choices. People are more likely to read a blog with an emotional picture, so give this a good amount of thought. This may be your last step when writing a blog, but don’t treat this as an afterthought.
There you have it. Those are 4 affordable (or free) ways to elevate your content above most of the blogs out there. By going with a quality host, staying mobile-friendly, locking into your readers’ real interest, and adding quality images, you're setting yourself up to succeed.
Your readers have to love your blog before Google does. But these 4 steps will impress both of them.
